Postcards from the Edge
Mary Kenny
God and Mammon are supposed to be mutually opposed – but God and shopping are apparently in harmony. Recently, at our Deal Catholic church, the parish priest, the entertaining Father Duncan Lourensz, announced from the altar that he would protest naked outside Sainsbury’s supermarket if we lost our most valued shop.
The store in peril is not Sainsbury’s, but Marks & Spencer, which has announced its springtime closure in Deal’s High Street as part of a ‘reshaping’ of overall policies. Parishioners were directed to sign the petition at the back of the church imploring the great Lord Sieff’s current successor, Archie Norman, to change his mind. Thousands have signed the petition to retain the store that’s been described as ‘the hub of the High Street’, and shoppers have been telling the local paper they are ‘devastated’.
But not everyone is devastated. Some remarked that Marks & Spencer’s clothes are so frumpy that they deserve to fail in any High Street, and I’m inclined to agree. M & S is faltering as a brand in many of its outlets, nationwide, because its clothes are so boring and unimaginative – especially those aimed at the older market. M & S hasn’t grasped the fact that older people today aren’t dim old grannies dressing in beige cardies: we’re the baby-boom generation of the 1960s who buy bright, jazzy gear.
Granted, it’s the loss of the food hall – always full of shoppers – that is most widely lamented, but M & S’s dreary fashions are a factor in its retail problems. However, petitions by dismayed customers rarely change the minds of accountants. Perhaps our priest should have recommended a novena to St Jude, patron of hopeless cases.
Just in case I get invited to a trendy north London dinner party, I’ve been reading Michel Houellebecq’s latest, hot-off-theshelves novel, Sérotonine. It’s to be published in English this spring, but I thought I’d be swanky and read it in French first.
Houellebecq is the must-read author with a reputation for catching the zeitgeist. His previous book, Soumission, predicted Islam’s eventual dominance over European culture. This one sets out to describe the decline of the West.
His tone of writing calls to mind Rod Liddle crossed with our own Wilfred De’ath: world-weary, sardonic, pricking the balloon of political correctness. Ennui mortel is the register. The authorial voice loathes everything – Paris, Spain, the Dutch, women and their ghastly beauty products, smartphones, the Japanese, and modern capitalism whereby property earns more than people. He relishes cigarettes, seeks emotionless sex and declines to wash himself. He plots to murder his Japanese girlfriend after he finds a particularly debauched sex scene on her computer – un gang-bang that involves dogs.
English words pepper his vernacular composition style – ‘le cloud’, ‘le early check-in’, ‘le film casting’, ‘mon breakfast’. Parts of it are engaging enough – the affecting double suicide of his parents, and the strange information that 12,000 French people every year choose to disappear, never to be traced again by family or friends. But the overall effect is utterly dispiriting. Ennui mortel, indeed.
English prevails everywhere. The more modernised Ireland has become, the more useful it is that Ireland is an Anglophone nation, thus attracting investment from Google, Facebook etc.
Theoretically, Irish is the first language; we all speak a little – known as the cúpla focal (couple of words) – and most of us pretend to know more. Perhaps sadly, increasing number of school students are requesting ‘exemptions’ from compulsory Irishlanguage classes.
Hiberno-english is not as quaint as it used to be. The ‘begorrahs’ and ‘bedads’ have disappeared, as has the idiom ‘after’, as in ‘Amn’t I after having a meal?’ ‘Amn’t’, the more logical contraction for ‘am I not’, is still in existence, though not as frequently heard as previously.
But the placatory prefix ‘dis’, usually preferred to ‘un’ remains in currency: a situation does not ‘deteriorate’ – but ‘disimproves’. There’s an optimistic implication that improvement was possible. ‘Disedifying’ is another variation on ‘unedifying’ that rang out throughout my schooldays – ‘Your conduct is most disedifying, Miss Kenny’.
‘Codology’ is a playful word for ‘balderdash’, and ‘morto’ is droll Dublinese for mortifying embarrassment. ‘Ballyragging’ is a great word, meaning bullied, harassed or intimidated. ‘She had me ballyragged all day.’ But is the origin Hindi rather than Irish?
The Irish are no longer a religious people, but swearing still invokes the now non-existent blasphemy, as in ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’, ‘God Almighty altogether!’ and ‘Sweet Jesus and his holy mother!’ as stressed exclamations. Much invoked in Dublin in response to Brexit frustrations.